How California should fight poverty: Add housing stock

The Associated Press

FILE - In this March 29, 2013 file photo, Antonio Garcia, 54, left, who introduced himself as a mathematician, peeks through the opening of his makeshift shelter made of cardboard boxes in the Skid Row area of Los Angeles. Reducing poverty has emerged as the key theme in California after state lawmakers moved closer to raising the minimum wage, expanding health care to immigrants and allowing child care providers to unionize. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

FILE - In this March 29, 2013 file photo, Antonio Garcia, 54, left, who introduced himself as a mathematician, peeks through the opening of his makeshift shelter made of cardboard boxes in the Skid Row area of Los Angeles. Reducing poverty has emerged as the key theme in California after state lawmakers moved closer to raising the minimum wage, expanding health care to immigrants and allowing child care providers to unionize. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File) (The Associated Press)

The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board

Three new studies commissioned by Next 10 — a San Francisco think tank that focuses on quality of life in California — make a powerful case that extreme housing costs threaten to make much of the state like Malibu and Santa Barbara, where only the wealthy can afford to live and most of the workers who support them have long commutes from cheaper inland areas. The analyses — prepared by Beacon Economics, a respected Los Angeles-based consultant — make a powerful case that the focus of state anti-poverty efforts should be bringing down housing costs.

Beacon reports that from 2005 to 2015, California ranked 49th out of 50 states in building new housing per capita. According to the latest data, it ranks 49th in homeownership and last in overall housing affordability. California renters also spend a higher percentage of their income on housing than their counterparts in all but one other state — even though Californians are far more likely to share apartments with non-family members than Americans in general.

These high costs are not daunting to the affluent. Net migration data show that from 2007 to 2014, 80,000 families with a household income of $150,000 or more moved to the Golden State. But during that span, 563,000 families with income of less than $50,000 left the state, as did 139,000 families with income from $50,000 to $99,999.

These trends are likely to continue, according to Beacon, unless state leaders change state laws — starting with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) — to make it easier to build new housing and less easy for opponents to tie up developers with demands and prolonged court battles. Without such changes, Beacon warned that the state could face worker shortages, depressed demand for goods and services, and increased welfare costs.

These reports should serve as a wake-up call to California’s political establishment. After seeing similar circumstances in his city, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio — one of the nation’s leading progressive politicians — launched a push to add 80,000 new housing units. Vox executive editor Matthew Yglesias — one of the nation’s leading progressive journalists — has expressed astonishment for years that there’s not a broader appreciation of how much restrictive housing regulations hurt the poor and middle class. In his 2012 e-book, “The Rent Is Too Damn High,” Yglesias wrote that high rent is “bad for the environment; it promotes long commutes, traffic jams, misery and smog. What’s more, high rent is not a fact of nature. It’s the result of bad public policy, and it deserves to be taken seriously as one of the critical problems we face.”

Especially in California. New Census Bureau measures that include cost of living show the state to be America’s poverty capital, with nearly one in four residents barely able or unable to make ends meet. But to date, attempts to address poverty have focused on raising the minimum wage and adding money to affordable housing programs that amount to lotteries in which select few families gain access to subsidized homes.

These are policies that allow the state’s most powerful forces to show sympathy for the impoverished without addressing the biggest cause of mass poverty. The millions of Californians who feel stricken by their monthly housing bills deserve far better.